Over years of using the shell on Unix-like systems, I've collected some tricks that dramatically increase productivity as well as give me great joy and street credibility among other developers when I utilize them. Here they are, in no particular order:

Aliases

Alias is a shorthand command that expands to a long one. You can define as many of them as you want in your shell's rc file (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc etc.).

• Finding and editing files quickly with the e alias:

alias e="fd --type=f | fzf --bind 'enter:execute(nvim {1})+abort' || true"

This requires fd and fzf to be installed. nvim can be adjusted to the editor of your choosing - nano would be more beginner-friendly alternative.

• Interacting with clipboard on Linux:

alias pbcopy="xsel --clipboard --input"
alias pbpaste="xsel --clipboard --output"

On macOS these commands are available natively.

• Finding file size:

alias size="du -d1 -h"

• Uploading a file to share publicly:

Transfer.sh is a great service that allows you to quickly share a file publicly:

$ curl --upload-file ./hello.txt https://transfer.sh/hello.txt

However, we can optimize it a step further by automatically copying the resulting public link into clipboard:

_transfer(){ if [ $# -eq 0 ];then echo "No arguments specified.\nUsage:\n transfer <file|directory>\n ... | transfer <file_name>">&2;return 1;fi;if tty -s;then file="$1";file_name=$(basename "$file");if [ ! -e "$file" ];then echo "$file: No such file or directory">&2;return 1;fi;if [ -d "$file" ];then file_name="$file_name.zip" ,;(cd "$file"&&zip -r -q - .)|curl --progress-bar --upload-file "-" "http://transfer.sh/$file_name"|tee /dev/null,;else cat "$file"|curl --progress-bar --upload-file "-" "http://transfer.sh/$file_name"|tee /dev/null;fi;else file_name=$1;curl --progress-bar --upload-file "-" "http://transfer.sh/$file_name"|tee /dev/null;fi;}

function transfer { _transfer "$*" | xsel --clipboard --input }

• Shorthands for git to copy latest commit's message or SHA1:

alias git-copy-last-commit-message="git log -1 --pretty=%B | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy"
alias git-copy-last-commit-sha="git rev-parse HEAD | tr -d '\n' | pbcopy"

• Removing all unused Docker images:

alias docker-images-gc="docker image ls --format='{{ .ID }}' | xargs docker image rm"

• Triggering CI with an empty commit:

alias t="git commit --allow-empty -m "Trigger CI" && git push"

• Switching between Java 8 and Java 11 (Ubuntu-only):

alias J8='sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-1.8.0-openjdk-amd64'
alias J11='sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64'

• Finding and replacing content in files:

Install ag and define agr function ("ag replace"):

function agr { ag -0 -l "$1" | AGR_FROM="$1" AGR_TO="$2" xargs -r0 perl -pi -e 's/$ENV{AGR_FROM}/$ENV{AGR_TO}/g'; }

Usage:

$ ag needle
$ agr oldtext newtext

Keyboard shortcuts

Due to using GNU Readline library, these keyboard shortcuts are commonly available:

Shortcut	Description
Ctrl+A	Go to beginning of the line
Ctrl+E	Go to end of the line
Ctrl+R	Search backwards in history
Ctrl+S	Search forwards in history

A good developer is a lazy developer; instead of typing commands over and over again, you should use history as much as possible.